K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Ripping DVDs with Thoggen

Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

Another bonus of having a fast machine on hand is that I can rip DVDs without having to wait hours on end for each one to finish (well, I still have to wait hours, but it’s better than it was). I’ve been using Thoggen to rip to ogg and it’s working quite well for me.

I know ogg isn’t the preferred media format for most folks, but these are for my own convenience (and portability, really), and so file format is completely inconsequential. Thoggen is delightfully simple and seems to encapsulate most of the basics (like cropping, sizing and file size management) without overcomplicating things.

As a side note, I have noticed that I occasionally can’t read from a DVD, in spite of loading just about every codec and multimedia package I could find on this machine (I went on a codec spree after I put Ubuntu on the machine). It’s all the more odd because, as a troubleshooting measure, I put Thoggen on my 1Ghz Inspiron running Arch and the same DVD worked fine.

That could be a region issue — the DVDs are not from America, and the original owner of the zv6000 was using it in America, so Microsoft and vendor lock-in might have somehow screwed me on that point. I only have a cursory understanding of region controls on DVD players, but if there’s a 5-disc limit before the drive ignores outside-region discs, I’ve probably passed that.

It’s of little consequence though. For now I’m content that Thoggen is doing the job, on one machine or another, and I can figure out why later.

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4 thoughts on “Ripping DVDs with Thoggen”

Hi there. Have you considered handbrake (handbrake.fr) for ripping dvd’s as well? It’s a nice cli application that just does the job (very well). I’ve been using it successfully to backup my entire dvd collection.

IIRC, you can change the region on most dvd drives 5 times maximum. I don’t know anything about a 5-region-mismatch limit. you might look in Universe for regionset and associated docs for more information.

Also, if you have the free space for it, I’d recommend trying mplayer to just dump the streams you want into separate files and then mux them together. Each rip ends up being 6-8 GB but you lose nothing in quality. It also doesn’t take nearly so long to rip that way.